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International Aerial Robotics Competition
The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) is a university-based robotics competition held on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology, currently hosted by RoboNation. Since 1991, collegiate teams with the backing of industry and government have fielded autonomous flying robots in an attempt to perform missions requiring robotic behaviors not previously exhibited by a flying machine. The term “aerial robotics” was coined by competition creator Robert Michelson in 1990 to describe a new class of small highly intelligent flying machines. Successive years of competition saw these aerial robots grow from vehicles that could barely maintain themselves in the air, to automatons which are self-stable, self-navigating, and able to interact with their environment.
The goal of the competition has been to provide a reason for the state-of-the-art of aerial robotics to move forward. Challenges have been geared towards producing advances. From 1991 through 2009, six missions were proposed. Each involved fully autonomous robotic behavior undemonstrated at the time. In October 2013 a seventh mission was proposed. It was the first to involve interaction between aerial robots and multiple ground robots. In 2016, the competition and its creator were recognized during the Georgia legislative session in the form of a senate resolution as the longest running aerial robotics competition in the world.
The initial mission to move a metallic disc from one side of an arena to the other was seen by many as almost impossible. The college teams improved their entries over the next two years when the competition saw its first autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing by a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1995, a team from Stanford University was able to acquire a single disk and move it from one side of the arena to the other in a fully autonomous flight—half.
The competition mission was toughened and made less abstract by requiring teams to search for a toxic waste dump, map the location of partially buried randomly oriented toxic waste drums, identify the contents of each drum from the hazard labels on the outside of each drum, and bring a sample back from one of the drums. In 1996, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University, with backing from Draper Labs, created a small fully autonomous flying robot that repeatedly and correctly mapped the location of all five of the toxic waste drums, and correctly identified the contents of two from the air, completing approximately seventy five percent of the mission. The following year, an aerial robot developed by a team from Carnegie Mellon University completed the entire mission.
The third mission began in 1998. It was a search and rescue mission requiring fully autonomous robots to take off, fly to a disaster area and search amid fires, broken water mains, clouds of toxic gas, and rubble. The scenario was recreated at the U.S. Department of Energy's Hazardous Material Management and Emergency Response (HAMMER) training facility. Because of the realism of the scenario, animatrons were used instead of human actors to simulate survivors incapable of extracting themselves from the disaster area. An aerial robot from Germany's Technische Universität Berlin was able to detect and avoid all of the obstacles, identify all the dead on the ground and the survivors (distinguishing between the two based on movement), and relay pictures of the survivors along with their locations back to first responders who would attempt a rescue. This mission was completed in 2000.
The fourth mission was initiated in 2001. It involved three scenarios requiring the same autonomous behavior: a hostage rescue mission where a submarine 3 kilometers off the coast must send an aerial robot to find a coastal city, identify the embassy where hostages are being held, locate valid openings in the embassy building, enter (or send in a sensor probe/subvehicle) and relay pictures of the hostages 3 km to the submarine prior to mounting an amphibious assault on the embassy to free the hostages; the discovery of an ancient mausoleum where a virus had killed the archaeological team, who had radioed that an important and undocumented tapestry was hanging inside, with 15 minutes to send an autonomous aerial robot to find the mausoleum, enter it (or send in a sensor probe/subvehicle) and relay pictures of the tapestry back prior to the destruction of the mausoleum and its contents; and an explosion at a nuclear reactor facility where scientists must send in an aerial robot to find the operating reactor building, enter the building (or send in a sensor probe/subvehicle) and relay pictures of the control panels to determine if a melt-down is imminent.
All three missions involved the same elements of ingress, locating, identification, entry, and relaying pictures within 15 minutes. It was conducted at the U.S. Army's Fort Benning Soldier Battle Lab using the McKenna MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain) site. The fourth mission was completed in 2008 with 27 teams who had demonstrated each of the required aerial robotic behaviors, except being able to demonstrate these behaviors in under 15 minutes—a feat considered by the judges to be inevitable given more time, and therefore no longer a significant challenge. Thus the fourth mission was terminated, $80,000 in awards distributed, and the fifth mission established.
The fifth mission picked up where the fourth mission left off by demonstrating the fully autonomous aerial robotic behaviors necessary to rapidly negotiate the confined internal spaces of a structure once it has been penetrated by an air vehicle. The nuclear reactor complex explosion scenario of the fourth mission was used as the backdrop for the fifth mission. The fifth mission required a fully autonomous aerial vehicle to penetrate the structure and negotiate the more complex interior space containing hallways, small rooms, obstacles, and dead ends in order to search for a designated target without the aid of global-positioning navigational aids, and relay pictures back to a monitoring station some distance from the structure. The First Symposium on Indoor Flight Issues was held in conjunction with this 2009 IARC event.
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International Aerial Robotics Competition
The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) is a university-based robotics competition held on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology, currently hosted by RoboNation. Since 1991, collegiate teams with the backing of industry and government have fielded autonomous flying robots in an attempt to perform missions requiring robotic behaviors not previously exhibited by a flying machine. The term “aerial robotics” was coined by competition creator Robert Michelson in 1990 to describe a new class of small highly intelligent flying machines. Successive years of competition saw these aerial robots grow from vehicles that could barely maintain themselves in the air, to automatons which are self-stable, self-navigating, and able to interact with their environment.
The goal of the competition has been to provide a reason for the state-of-the-art of aerial robotics to move forward. Challenges have been geared towards producing advances. From 1991 through 2009, six missions were proposed. Each involved fully autonomous robotic behavior undemonstrated at the time. In October 2013 a seventh mission was proposed. It was the first to involve interaction between aerial robots and multiple ground robots. In 2016, the competition and its creator were recognized during the Georgia legislative session in the form of a senate resolution as the longest running aerial robotics competition in the world.
The initial mission to move a metallic disc from one side of an arena to the other was seen by many as almost impossible. The college teams improved their entries over the next two years when the competition saw its first autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing by a team from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 1995, a team from Stanford University was able to acquire a single disk and move it from one side of the arena to the other in a fully autonomous flight—half.
The competition mission was toughened and made less abstract by requiring teams to search for a toxic waste dump, map the location of partially buried randomly oriented toxic waste drums, identify the contents of each drum from the hazard labels on the outside of each drum, and bring a sample back from one of the drums. In 1996, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University, with backing from Draper Labs, created a small fully autonomous flying robot that repeatedly and correctly mapped the location of all five of the toxic waste drums, and correctly identified the contents of two from the air, completing approximately seventy five percent of the mission. The following year, an aerial robot developed by a team from Carnegie Mellon University completed the entire mission.
The third mission began in 1998. It was a search and rescue mission requiring fully autonomous robots to take off, fly to a disaster area and search amid fires, broken water mains, clouds of toxic gas, and rubble. The scenario was recreated at the U.S. Department of Energy's Hazardous Material Management and Emergency Response (HAMMER) training facility. Because of the realism of the scenario, animatrons were used instead of human actors to simulate survivors incapable of extracting themselves from the disaster area. An aerial robot from Germany's Technische Universität Berlin was able to detect and avoid all of the obstacles, identify all the dead on the ground and the survivors (distinguishing between the two based on movement), and relay pictures of the survivors along with their locations back to first responders who would attempt a rescue. This mission was completed in 2000.
The fourth mission was initiated in 2001. It involved three scenarios requiring the same autonomous behavior: a hostage rescue mission where a submarine 3 kilometers off the coast must send an aerial robot to find a coastal city, identify the embassy where hostages are being held, locate valid openings in the embassy building, enter (or send in a sensor probe/subvehicle) and relay pictures of the hostages 3 km to the submarine prior to mounting an amphibious assault on the embassy to free the hostages; the discovery of an ancient mausoleum where a virus had killed the archaeological team, who had radioed that an important and undocumented tapestry was hanging inside, with 15 minutes to send an autonomous aerial robot to find the mausoleum, enter it (or send in a sensor probe/subvehicle) and relay pictures of the tapestry back prior to the destruction of the mausoleum and its contents; and an explosion at a nuclear reactor facility where scientists must send in an aerial robot to find the operating reactor building, enter the building (or send in a sensor probe/subvehicle) and relay pictures of the control panels to determine if a melt-down is imminent.
All three missions involved the same elements of ingress, locating, identification, entry, and relaying pictures within 15 minutes. It was conducted at the U.S. Army's Fort Benning Soldier Battle Lab using the McKenna MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain) site. The fourth mission was completed in 2008 with 27 teams who had demonstrated each of the required aerial robotic behaviors, except being able to demonstrate these behaviors in under 15 minutes—a feat considered by the judges to be inevitable given more time, and therefore no longer a significant challenge. Thus the fourth mission was terminated, $80,000 in awards distributed, and the fifth mission established.
The fifth mission picked up where the fourth mission left off by demonstrating the fully autonomous aerial robotic behaviors necessary to rapidly negotiate the confined internal spaces of a structure once it has been penetrated by an air vehicle. The nuclear reactor complex explosion scenario of the fourth mission was used as the backdrop for the fifth mission. The fifth mission required a fully autonomous aerial vehicle to penetrate the structure and negotiate the more complex interior space containing hallways, small rooms, obstacles, and dead ends in order to search for a designated target without the aid of global-positioning navigational aids, and relay pictures back to a monitoring station some distance from the structure. The First Symposium on Indoor Flight Issues was held in conjunction with this 2009 IARC event.